Marilyn Thipthorpe
It seems that each and every day at some moment or another we are popping pill. Painkillers, anxiety meds, pressure and diet pills; nothing is left behind in the race to be healthy. More often than not, when you fall seriously ill antibiotics are prescribed by the doctors and with the rate that people are falling ill nowadays, the intake of antibiotics has increased ten-fold. Chancellor George Osborn has stated that resistance to antibiotics will soon become a greater threat than cancer; the latest evidence shows that approximately 10 million people will die around the globe annually due to the fact that they become immune to antibiotics and cannot be cured of common infections. He went on to say this immunity will have enormous economic costs in the sense that antimicrobial resistance will reduce the GDP by 3.5%. Osborn further says that there needs to be a dramatic shift in incentive for pharmaceutical companies to get more long term effective results that will both help human lives and the economic stability of the world. In 2014, the Prime Minister of the UK was the first to speak out against this imminent threat and say that something needs to be done in order to tackle the global threat in drug resistance. Osborn is now said to be backing a proposal given Lord O’Neill to create rewards which will pay large amount of subsidies to pharmaceutical companies to get new antibiotics and diagnostic on the market.